Born in May
Dominique Ansel was born in 1978 in Beauvais, north of Paris, and started working in a restaurant kitchen at sixteen to help support his family. He spent eight years at the Paris pâtisserie Fauchon before moving to New York in 2006 to become pastry chef at Daniel, Daniel Boulud's flagship restaurant — a serious classical training, not an obvious runway toward viral fame.
On 10 May 2013, Ansel introduced the Cronut at his own bakery in SoHo: a croissant-doughnut hybrid built from a proprietary laminated dough, proofed and then fried in grapeseed oil. It took him two months of development to land on the recipe. The pastry went viral almost immediately, drawing lines around the block on a scale bakeries rarely see for a single item, and TIME named it one of the year's 25 best inventions of 2013.
What separates the Cronut from most food fads is that the invention is traceable to an exact date, an exact bakery and an exact creator — a rarity in a category usually built on borrowed ideas and disputed origins. Ansel has since built a small network of New York concepts around the original SoHo bakery, including the Dominique Ansel Workshop croissant café in Flatiron and Papa d'Amour, built around Asian bread culture; he has also been named World's Best Pastry Chef by the World's 50 Best Restaurants organization.
The Cronut is still made at the original SoHo address, still laminated and proofed and fried to the same two-months-in-the-making recipe — a pastry launched on a specific May morning that turned out to have a decade's worth of imitators still chasing it.
Article references
The houses in this story
- Dominique Ansel Bakery Greenwich Village, Manhattan
Dominique Ansel trained eight years at Fauchon before becoming pastry chef at Daniel Boulud's Daniel in New York in 2006. On May 10, 2013, at his own Soho bakery he introduced the Cronut, a laminated dough proofed then fried in grapeseed oil; TIME named it one of that year's 25 best inventions. store page → · open in the atlas →